Recent content by apchar

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    What Is Time and Why Do We Misunderstand It?

    Time is natures way of keeping everything from happening at once. ;->
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    Field at the center of a toroidal permanent magnet

    I'd like to make a strong (~0.5 T) solenoidal field with a permanent magnet for a Faraday rotation experiment. If I take an ordinary cylindrical permanent magnet (with an axial field) and drill a hole down the center of it. What's the field deep inside at the center of the hole? Some of the flux...
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    Do lasers suffer R^2 propagation loss

    But the dimensions of an antenna have to be comparable to the wavelength to be effective (D ~ lambda), making the point at which the far field begins a wavelength or two away. Is the same not true for lasers? What about scattered laser light?
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    Do lasers suffer R^2 propagation loss

    The intensity (W/m^2) of an electromagnetic wave from an ordinary antenna decreases with the square of the distance from the emitter (in the far field.) Is the same true for a laser beam?
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    Whats the real definition of inductance?

    That's too macroscopic. It treats the inductor as a black box. I can build all manner of 1 port circuits that resist a change in the current flow but that doesn't make them inductors. I'm looking for a definition based on the physics.
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    Whats the real definition of inductance?

    My old freshman physics text defined inductance as flux/turns, which applies only to solenoids. This seems like a pretty weak definition since any length of wire in any geometry has some inductance. There has to be a more general definition. My first guess was that L could be calculated from...
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    Need to preionize xenon lamp with somethingium

    Krypton is a gas. I was thinking of something solid. I know Krypton is used in some bulbs. Is that the isotope commonly used? I could affix a small Krypton bulb to my big Xenon bulb.
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    Need to preionize xenon lamp with somethingium

    We're building a very high power xenon flashlamp with electrodes so far apart that some kind of pre-ionization is necessary to start the discharge. I dump 10,000 volts across the electrodes so I just need a few loose electrons to get the ball rolling. I've been using a Tesla coil to get a...
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    Does Biot-Savart law apply at high frequencies?

    The Biot-Savart law for calculating magnetic fields due to a current is presented in my freshman physics book as a general way of getting B from I. But there's no time delay implied by the integral. Can I just manually throw the time delay into the integral? For instance, to numerically...
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    Pacemakers and lightning bolts

    I'm working on a lightning bolt experiment at U of Washington to see how carbon composite materials hold up when hit by lightning. We have as much as a 40 kV 80 kA 50 us arc across a <1cm gap from a copper/tungsten electrode to a plate of carbon composite connected to ground. I know this must...
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